dark and rainy Wednesday morning

Well shit.

Long ago when the Trib, with its bold pro-McCarthy political cartoons smack dab in the middle of the front page, arrived on our doorstep every morning I would spread it on the floor and explore it.  So many photos, pictures, words, words, words, advertising, and all these columns sprinkled throughout.  I remember one called The Duke of Paducah.  What a town this Paducah must be, to be in the title of a column in The World's Greatest Newspaper.  And then there was something called In the Wake of the News.  I don't remember what its content was but the title was followed by this little bit of doggerel:

The Wake depends (help, help)

Upon its friends

Do you see where I am going with this Dawgs?   I like a soapy shower in the morning and then there are cats to be fed and coffee and yogurt to be brought to the table, and the old 'puter is slowly wakening as I shoot my cuffs and crack my knuckles in preparation of seeing what the dawgs may have written and shuffling that around in my mind and thinking of differing ways to riff on that and presently I am click clacking away happy as the proverbial clam.

I suppose I could just go off on my own as I am doing this rainy morning full of the darkness of DST, but I'd rather have something to comment on, and writing is not a solitary art, you want to believe that somebody is reading what you wrote, you want to see what reaction you wrote had, you don't want to feel so Oh my God am I hear all alone.

And as a good liberal, the first thing that occurs to me is, is it me?  Sometimes I know I get a little too hot under the collar discussing politics, maybe sometimes I just go on and on, maybe dawg eyes are rolling, enough already.


Had an old Champaign buddy die Monday.  Well probably he died a week before, he had become kind of a recluse spending his days in front of his big screen tv smoking Luckies and a little dope and taking pills he got from the VA and venturing out just for food and stuff like that.  He had a little porch and I once bought him a fancy lawn chair, the kind with cup holders, and urged him to sit outside a bit on a summer evening and feel the breeze and watch the cars go by, but the chair never got out of the box.

He did have a few friends who dropped by maybe once a month.  Monday one of them knocked on the door and there was no answer and he called the cops and they broke in and there he was dead a week they estimated. 

I hate to think of him gone unsung.  I am thinking of using these posts to tell his story.